Bosch, Siemens: Vorsprung durch kinder und technik

Blighty giggles, says 'I've always been hopeless at sums'

Remorseless Teutonic engineering firms, already desperate for engineering talent and seeing worse times ahead, have now moved their recruitment efforts into the kindergarten. Companies such as Bosch and Siemens believe that the post-industrial rot has now gone so deep that children must be put on the hard and righteous path at the pre-school stage.

"Starting at school is not good enough," said Maria Schumm-Tschauder of Siemens, speaking to the Financial Times. She has supplied no less than 3,000 €500 "discovery boxes" full of sci/tech goodies to German tinies in the hope that this will steel them against the insidious temptation, once at school and university, to sign up for fuzzy-studies courses involving very little work. Rather, having learnt the joy of tech as nippers, they would be inspired to graft hard, learn some maths and become useful members of society.

"This is our future and we need to seize it," added Wolfgang Malchow of Bosch. His firm has been sending its apprentices back into kindergartens, there perhaps to extol the joys of having a proper job over those of being a drug-addled soft studies graduate fit for few careers other than prostitution.

"Germany is based on innovation," said Bosch supremo Franz Fehrenbach, "and that needs people".

Meanwhile old Blighty, not to be outdone, has also revealed new plans to stem the similar decline in Blighty's technological prowess. Essentially, the goal is that within ten years every primary school in the country will have a teacher who is capable of teaching maths at the primary school level - truly a noble goal.

According to the report on which the British government's action is based:

The United Kingdom remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially acceptable – fashionable, even – to profess an inability to cope with mathematics.

There was a warning back in Germany for those who believe it doesn't matter, and the main priority in education is to produce nice socially-integrated people rather than ones who know stuff.

One major tech CEO told the FT: "We can always go to Asia to find our engineers." ®